The Band Played On

On a recent Sunday afternoon, Salman Ahmad, a Pakistani-American professor of music at Queens College, in Flushing, and a rock star who has sold tens of millions of albums worldwide, was sitting in a parked S.U.V. in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, beside the World’s Fair New York State Pavilion. From the driver’s seat, he chanted, “Lam, vam, ram, yam, ham, sham, om.” His view included distant cricketers, a long line of portable toilets, a jazz band playing to an audience of several dozen, and Mr. Met, the baseball-headed mascot, who was on a hurried, bouncy search for high fives.

Like the monuments of the World’s Fair, Ahmad is fifty; he had a long ponytail, and was wearing a sweatsuit over a shirt printed with many portraits of Imran Khan, the Pakistani politician and former cricket star, who is a friend. Ahmad was preparing to go onstage at the first Louis Armstrong International Music Festival, to play guitar and sing with his band, Junoon—although this was not quite the Junoon with which Ahmad found fame, in the nineteen-nineties, in South Asia. That band—Styx, in Urdu, with tablas—broke up in 2005. Ahmad by then had moved, with his family, from Pakistan to Tappan, New York, where he had lived in his teens. He continued to front various versions of Junoon, and wrote a memoir, “Rock & Roll Jihad.” The band’s original lead singer, Ali Azmat, is now a judge on “Pakistan Idol,” where he has the show’s disobliging, Simon Cowell role—one that his former bandmate regards as not much of a stretch.

At Flushing Meadows, Junoon was made up of an Indian-born tabla player and five graduates of Tappan Zee High School: Ahmad, his twenty-one-year-old son, two of his son’s friends, and, on bass, John-Alec Raubeson, a contemporary of Ahmad’s who was once in a Tappan band that, according to Raubeson, was called either No Way Out or One Way Out.

In the minutes before Junoon’s set, Raubeson was in the passenger seat of the S.U.V., softly chanting the sounds of the chakras with Ahmad. This ritual done, the two reminisced about Dan Spitz, a high-school friend who went on to play with Anthrax, the thrash-metal band, and who once encouraged Ahmad, newly arrived from Lahore, to buy a ticket to what became a life-changing Led Zeppelin concert at Madison Square Garden. “I was a complete nerd,” Ahmad said, and laughed. He told his mother that Led Zeppelin was a class project.

Before walking over to the stage, Ahmad recalled playing at Imran Khan rallies, to tens of thousands, before last year’s Pakistani general election; and he described a concert in Indian Kashmir, six years ago, “to promote peace between India and Pakistan—and the militants said, ‘If you come, we’ll shoot you down.’ ” He went on, “It was one of the most amazing gigs, against the backdrop of the Himalayas.” A pause. “So Mr. Met is something new again. You never know what life is going to bring.”

The crowd was small but welcoming. By the end of the first song, a tanned, shirtless man in his seventies, wearing denim shorts, had risen from his camp chair and had begun to dance while playing air guitar, his feet sending up little Pig-Pen clouds of dust. Planes took off steeply from LaGuardia. “Who’s heard of the poet Bulleh Shah?” Ahmad asked, at one point. “You would have if you’d taken my class.”

Afterward, at the side of the stage, Ahmad hugged a few recent students from his Islamic Music and Culture of South Asia class. These included Eric Bierig, who complimented his professor by comparing Junoon to Phish. Ahmad replied, “It’s weird—I’ve never really listened to Phish. If I were here, I would go with you to the New York gig, but I’m going to be in Pakistan, doing polio eradication.”

Ahmad walked back to his car, and reflected on the forthcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of Junoon. “I called Ali up. I said, ‘Let bygones be bygones—Pakistan really needs Junoon to be together.’ But he’s on some other tangent. He’s Pepsi-Idol-Man.” He laughed. “He’s not there yet. But my door’s open.”

Behind the stage, on a field of play that included a fire hydrant and an asphalt path, a game of cricket was under way. Sudeep Kanwal, a photographer who grew up in India, was waiting to bat. He had heard the Junoon music, which he recognized from his youth, over the sound of the Van Wyck Expressway, and had been puzzled, thinking that the band had broken up. “I was a big fan, back in the day,” he said, as one of his teammates hit a ball that only just missed a sunbather. ♦

Ian Parker contributed his first piece to The New Yorker in 1994 and became a staff writer in 2000.